what a diagnosis is
a way to justify a pill prescription,
a dull tool,
one doctor’s opinion,
an idea we can ponder
in the isolation room,
Palaces P.
Journey of Self-Discovery
by Palaces P.
I see those articles called, “Alternatives to Self-Harm,” and I think, there is no alternative
to self-harm.
Continue reading “Palaces P.”Maggie Lou Rader
SAINT AND SINNER
Continue reading “Maggie Lou Rader”G.B. Lindsey
Look Up An Inch
Climbing out, it turns out, is much the same as falling in. The pit has insidious walls. They reverberate like plucked piano wires. Every minute is a sound, and every minute that hits them bounces back, resounds and resounds until that minute, that moment, that second becomes endless, infinite. Each echo darkens the dark, and each sickly, sickening thought that you beg not to think glares brighter and brighter until it rewrites itself against the flesh of your brain. Until it blinds utterly.
Continue reading “G.B. Lindsey”Call for Featured Writers for the 2022 – 2023 Year
Madwomen in the Attic is seeking featured writers for The Featured Writer Project’s 2022-2023 writing year, which will begin in January 2022.
Open reading period: August – October 31, 2021. We feature women and gender-non-conforming writers and artists.
This is a non-competitive call for submissions, open to writers from any location across the globe; all who wish to be featured writers and who fulfill the submission guidelines will be included in this project and archive.
Continue reading “Call for Featured Writers for the 2022 – 2023 Year”Lolo W
puddle kingdom
A little monster clogged my drain
Forced its mouth to bend
Space
Continue reading “Lolo W”Joni Ravenna
BEETHOVEN AND MISFORTUNE COOKIES
Based on the true life story of Kabin Thomas
Written by Joni Ravenna
TRT: 60:00 (may run straight or with intermission)
In 2006, Kabin Thomas – a 43 year-old, black Music Appreciation Professor at The University of Arkansas whose classes all had wait lists and a 90% attendance record – was fired after a white student complained about the use of profanity and a graphic image depicting a lynching in one of his lessons. This is the story of how he lost himself and then found his way back.
Continue reading “Joni Ravenna”Gwendolyn Harper
Sleep of Waking
I tire of sleeping
And yet all around are the somnolent
The unconscious
The dreaming
The listless and stirring
Continue reading “Gwendolyn Harper”Nicole Luongo
The Becoming is a brutal account of mental illness by a woman who doesn’t believe in mental illness. A lifetime of addiction, eating disorders, and trauma culminates explosively after the author begins a PhD at the University of Oxford, and while in hospital she is liberated through psychosis. Her journey from terror to self-acceptance is grueling, and she makes meaning of it by weaving reflexive narrative with classic and nascent scholarship. Part phenomenological recounting, part social critique, the text disrupts bio-medical approaches to altered states by exploring their emancipatory potential. It also illuminates how conventional mental health treatment pathologizes human suffering. In doing so, The Becoming contributes to anti-psychiatry and Mad studies projects, each of which asks, “what does it mean to be sane?”
Continue reading “Nicole Luongo”